Law as social "form"

Abstract

Óscar Correas was a jurist who, born in Argentina, went into exile in Mexico in 1976. In this country, he developed a wide theoretical production, starting from Marxist criticism, passing through Kelsenian and semiotic investigations on the legal phenomenon and, at another moment of his theoretical production, approaching studies on indigenous law and legal plurality. He was one of the creators and editors of the Critica Jurídica magazine. He died on April 27, 2020. In memory of his profound relevance in Latin American critical legal thinking, Guilherme Cavicchioli Uchimura and Rodolfo Carvalho Neves dos Santos present the translation into Brazilian Portuguese of the text originally titled "El derecho como 'forma' social'”, formulated in 1981 by Correas. In it, the author presented an analysis of the legal phenomenon based on the problematization of the way in which it had been understood in the Marxist tradition, mainly from the reception of Pachukanis and Cerroni in Latin America. Thus, he faced the characterization of law as a social form and its relationship with economics – passing through the debates of the “reflex theory” and the binomial superstructure-infrastructure in the theory of law – from the diversities and specificities of each “sector of the law” (civil law, labor law, economic law, public law and criminal law).